After installing a Microswiss Direct Drive extruder, I had one issue – the print end would not return to its last position after pressing pause. Since I did not use the pause feature often, I was not in a hurry to find a solution. However, I started to really miss being able to make multicolor prints. I finally contacted Microswiss and asked for help. A couple of weeks after back and forth emails, a super-knowledgeable and conscientious person named Paul found a solution. It was a retraction issue in the slicer.

Paul gave me the following instructions that worked:

• Create a brand new CR-10 Mini profile in your slicer, starting with the default settings and Start GCode, and then only make this one change, leaving everything else at the default. Retraction Distance: 1.0mm
• Restore Failsafe and Store Memory to bring back the printer settings to their original presets.
• Set the Esteps to 130 via the menus: Control > Motion > Esteps/mm: 130
This should basically bring the printer firmware to how it was before the direct-drive installation.

One of the Tips and Tricks in the installation instructions is to reduce retraction. The maximum recommended retraction is 1.5mm @ 35mm/sec. The default retraction amount for Cura’s PLA profile is 5mm. I have not changed this when changing profiles as I had forgotten it was necessary. My prints in general have been okay, but perhaps not adjusting this number has caused past failures.

I use Cura 4.6 as a slicer for my CR10 mini. Retraction is under the Travel tab in Cura. It involves the extruder pulling filament backwards. I don’t understand why retracting filament 4mm less than normal affected the location it returned to after pausing. In searching for an explanation, I found information on 3dprinterly.com about an issue Ender 3 with a 32 bit board may have with pausing –

Newer Ender 3 printers with the new 32-bit boards may have some trouble using the Pause at Height command. This is because they have a problem reading the M0 pause command in the G-Code.
To solve this problem, after adding the Pause at Height script to your G-code, save it……..

Another explanation could be a bug in Cura’s script. Redditor pnt 103, in response to a post, wrote: “There’s a bug in the PauseAtHeight Python script in Cura 4.8 and earlier. It causes it to read the X and Y values from the wrong layer when moving back to restart, which can give a similar effect. It’s fixed in Cura 4.9.0 and later.”

A Pause in Height issue was addressed with version 4.6, but I am not familiar enough with Python to know if something regarding retraction was changed. Regardless, I am delighted that Paul at Microswiss was able to find a solution.